RE: Sorry for the last post wrong word but to ask is God actually a bad guy.

What the hell does "believed in darwin" even mean?

Are you seriously trying to suggest no one accepted Darwin's idea until recently?

I'm genuinely confused. Not only at what you're claiming, but where you get that idea.

He published Origin in 1859. His idea has been confirmed by independent lines of evidence numerous times, since then. There was literally so much evidence with the development of the field of genetics that, in the 1930s, it was necessary to reform the idea into what is called "The New Synthesis", which is still used, today.

So... uh... whatchu talking 'bout, Willis?

"Theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God?" - E. O. Wilson

RE: Sorry for the last post wrong word but to ask is God actually a bad guy.

(25-06-2017 10:09 PM)socialistview Wrote: Tell me how many scientist agree with his thesis.

How many scientists agree with his thesis? Are you kidding?

Evolution by Natural Selection is quite literally the cornerstone concept of the entire field; asking how many biologists agree with it is a bit like asking how many physicists agree with the General Theory of Relativity. It's quite literally impossible to understand each field without understanding how the theories work.

I would estimate that perhaps one person out of ten thousand who holds an advanced degree in science doesn't agree with it, and I've literally NEVER heard of one who rejects evolution for any reason other than they refuse to accept it for religious reasons. [Edit to Add: In case you're bad at math, I'm saying that 9,999 out of 10,000 scientists in the world would tell you evolution is 100% correct, and that we only argue over small details.]

I would also remind you, as I have before, that two of the leading evolutionary biologists are Christians... one an evangelical (Francis Collins) and one a Catholic (Kenneth Miller).

"Theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God?" - E. O. Wilson

RE: Sorry for the last post wrong word but to ask is God actually a bad guy.

Depends what you mean by "examine DNA". Genetics as a field is independent from DNA analysis, and goes back to Gregor Mendel paper, published in German in 1865 (six years after Darwin and Wallace published independent papers demonstrating evolution by Natural Selection), though people mostly ignored his discovery until around 1900, and Darwin never read Mendel.

Our ability to look at chromosomes goes back to around 1900, as well, though it didn't become really developed until the 1930s, which is what in part necessitated the combination of that field with evolutionary biology, to form the New Synthesis.

In the 1950s, new techniques for comparing DNA chemically were developed, and the shape of the DNA double helix was discovered using x-rays. We also developed (very very slow) methods of looking at DNA markers and reading what was actually on the DNA chain, during the next couple of decades.

In the 1980s, the Polymerase Chain Reaction catalyst method allowed DNA to be amplified accurately, so it could be quickly read by new sensors and high-speed computers, allowing the first of the modern methods of DNA comparison to be done.

So, it's something we've been doing for a long time. And the important thing to note here is that evolution as a fact had already been established by several other lines of evidence-- but any of the above discoveries in genetics could have overturned the whole thing, and instead have provided independent corroboration of Darwin and Wallace's discoveries.

Evolution is reality. Simple as that.

"Theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God?" - E. O. Wilson

RE: Sorry for the last post wrong word but to ask is God actually a bad guy.

(25-06-2017 10:46 PM)socialistview Wrote: But it was ignored till the 1900's right and we couldnt really prove it till the 1950's.

What makes you say that?

Where could you have possibly gotten that from what I said?

Evolution had already been known since the time of Darwin's grandfather. Darwin wasn't the only person to come up with Natural Selection as the mechanism of evolution, either; a guy clear on the other side of the planet (southeast Asia and the South Pacific, mainly) came up with the idea at essentially the same time, and they published on the same day by mutual agreement. Darwin had more data and read his paper first, which is why we remember him specifically, but Wallace really has equal credit.

Like any new scientific idea, not everyone accepted Darwin's idea right off the bat. For one thing, there were few fossils known at the time to demonstrate the history of life on the planet and he had a fuzzy idea about the mechanism by which it was transmitted between generations. The former would be cleared up in the next 50 years by significant work in the field of geology, while the latter (genetic inheritance) would be discovered by Mendel and re-discovered by others, only to find Mendel had beat them to it in an obscure journal that unfortunately was not widely read.

Though Darwin turned out to be right in almost every one of his predictions, evolution was well proved in the early 20th century by advances in geology and by new discoveries in biology. By the time genetics came along and "proved" it, in the sense that you mean, the Theory of Evolution by means of Natural Selection was already totally accepted by the scientific community because of the many different types of evidence that all pointed to the same conclusion.

When rapid DNA analysis came along, it was simply ANOTHER new line of evidence. It could have disproved everything that scientists had thought for a full century by the time we could read DNA... but it turned out to confirm everything else. That's what is meant by a "predictive model"; it makes predictions about what should be true if the model (theory) is accurate, and when new data comes along, it either fits with the predictions or it does not. In this case it did, and overwhelmingly so.

No serious scientist today doubts evolution or Natural Selection. As I said, the only objections to evolution come from people with prejudices based on their religious upbringing.

Unfortunately, those people make a lot of noise to try to make themselves sound like a bigger (and better-credentialed) group than they are. Even among the Creationists, there are none who think evolution* does not happen-- they simply think that the big changes, called "macroevolution" could not have happened by entirely natural means... though when pressed for details about how micro could not turn into macro, they don't have a serious answer, because of course micro and macro evolution are really the same thing, just repeated over more generations.

Short version: evolution has been proved since Darwin wrote his paper and book, and almost everyone who read them agreed... other than small details, there's almost nothing he got wrong, even when speculating. He was careful to point out when he was speculating and when he was describing something for which he had data, but he had so much data that he was able to form a picture of the history of life on earth which turned out to be proved when methods he would not have been able to dream of were developed. In that sense, Darwin's ideas have been "proved" since the 1950s. But they were only there to be proved because he had already built a solid case, and provided lots of evidence that it was so.

*Ironically, the Creationists have had to try to fit the Noah's Ark story into their ideas about the history of the world and, recognizing that there are too many species known today for them all to have fit into the listed dimensions of the Ark, they have proposed a post-flood mutation/evolution rate that is hundreds of times faster than that predicted by real evolutionary biologists. They then make the claim that despite this rapid evolution among "created kinds", which somehow stopped before modern times (by some unknown mechanism), it's still impossible for evolution to have caused the different phyla/classes of animals and plants to have evolved. It's baffling to me.

"Theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God?" - E. O. Wilson

RE: Sorry for the last post wrong word but to ask is God actually a bad guy.

Evolution has shown itself to be especially strong since it's the (only) scientific theory that almost all fundamentalists challenge constantly. Between all their collective efforts, they've not made one dent in it.

Of course, for this to mean anything, you have to understand what science is, what a theory is, what falsifiability is, and so on. That takes effort. It's far easier to fling shit from your armchair.

I have a website here which discusses the issues and terminology surrounding religion and atheism. It's hopefully user friendly to all.

RE: Sorry for the last post wrong word but to ask is God actually a bad guy.

@ Socialist View -

Evolution has proof, and is widely accepted to be fact. Unless you have a more credible theory and the evidence to back it up, you might want to stop now.

"When you’re in a relationship, you’re in a band. Sometimes you sing lead and sometimes you’re on tambourine. And if you’re on tambourine, play it right. Play it with a fucking smile. ‘Cause nobody wants to see a mad tambourine player.” - Chris Rock